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It's not elimination. It's called "having a standard language so people can communicate". People still speak their non-Mandarin mother tongues at home and in ge
by k_sze 5y ago
It's not elimination. It's called "having a standard language so people can communicate". People still speak their non-Mandarin mother tongues at home and in general. Local dialects are still used at the bank, at government service centers, etc. It's just that you must _be able_ to communicate in Mandarin in case somebody from another province walks in. Some local schools, especially for minorities, still teach their mother tongue in school as a subject, on purpose - e.g. schools in Xinjiang.
- randomhodler84 5y agoHistory teaches us that is is exactly how an authoritarian state goes about eliminating local cultural identity and language.
- blondin 5y agoah come on guys, let's take a step back before making comments such as this one.
- CogitoCogito 5y ago> ah come on guys, let's take a step back before making comments such as this one. Care to explain what part of the comment you take issue with?
- randomhodler84 5y agoOr open one’s eyes to the cultural engineering that is occurring. Am I wrong?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- LAC-Tech 5y agoIf you look at any language that got wiped out, or nearly got wiped out, the story is always the same: "they punished us at school if we spoke $MOTHER_TONGUE instead of $NATIONAL_LANGUAGE".
- another_story 5y agoAnd they intentionally exclude it others. Kids in the 90s would get the stick if they spoke in Cantonese in school.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoPeople still speak their non-Mandarin mother tongues at home and in general. Local dialects are still used at the bank, at government service centers, etc. This isn't what actually happens in practice though. In practice, children speak the language their school tells them to speak. And generation by generation less and less people speak the other language, and in smaller and smaller areas. I'm somewhat familiar with the situation in Taiwan. No one is actively suppressing Hokkien (or Taiwanese or whatever you want to call it) anymore, but the language of instruction is still Mandarin and so Hokkien is dying rapidly. Even in cases where both parents speak it, often their children can just understand it and don't speak it, and there's zero chance their children - grandchildren of hokkien speakers - will. Used to work with some Chinese Malaysians from Penang. All under 30, all spoke Mandarin to each other because the level of Hokkien knowledge ranged from "fluent" to "none at all".
- k_sze 5y agoI don't know what you're talking about. My family-in-law is from Mainland China. My wife's sisters are married to different provinces. My nephews and nieces all pick up their non-Mandarin mother tongues.
- mango7283 5y agoI mean for Malaysia, schoolchildren of Chinese descent already have to pick up at least 3 standard languages Mandarin <- standard malaysian mandarin English <- duh Malay <- the official language of Malaysia On top of that, you add on the dialect, now there are practical considerations 1) Penang <- dominant dialect hokkien, and a penang kid who isn't even hokkien is going to need to figure out which dialect to use, hokkien, his native dialect or mandarain or english 2) KL <- cantonese in general, BUT certain places have certain stronger dialects etc etc etc For practical reasons alone most people are going to focus on those top 3. I know some people who are reasonably fluent in no less than 5 languages but it's not that common and you will obviously see at least two or 3 are passable at best. These are going to happen even if the schools could somehow teach 4-5 dialects + standard mandarin +_ english + malay!
- LAC-Tech 5y ago